On Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 3:59:22 AM UTC-7 Michael Orlitzky wrote: On 2023-04-26 19:59:01, Matthias Koeppe wrote: > Just as a data point, eliminating the spkg and only supporting system PARI > 2.15.x would have the effect to eliminate support of: > - all versions of Ubuntu except for 23.04 (lunar); > - all openSUSE Leap versions, leaving only the rolling distro (Tumbleweed). > Source: https://repology.org/project/pari/versions
It would be better if we could support the last minor version of PARI as well, but I'm not volunteering anyone else's time to do it. If we adopt a more flexible approach in sagelib, we'll sometimes get lucky: there just won't be any breakage between minor versions, or it will be trivial to support both. But yes, there will eventually be some change that forces us to say "upgrade your PARI, or use an older version of sage." It's not the end of the world if users on a distro with old dependencies have to stick to an older version of sage. Ideally, they would be getting sage from their distro in the first place. A problem only arises when you try to build a bleeding-edge sage on an older stable distro -- an undertaking unsupported by most projects. Is it? I would say that Sage is very special in this regard because of its extreme number of complicated dependencies; and because of its long-standing goals of empowering the members of the user community to become contributors. For example, people can contribute to sympy, numpy, scipy etc. on a very wide range of systems (pretty much the same that we currently support in the Sage distribution because we recently tightened our compiler requirements based on scipy's needs). And we know that development against an old version of Sage is not practical; we always recommend to people to start from the latest beta for development. But this creates a serious barrier: If Sage development can only be done on bleeding-edge distributions, new Sage developers need to abandon their current distribution. That's really bad. Anyone bothered by this can of course send us patches that extend compatibility to older PARI. Would we welcome such patches? When we upgrade a package such as PARI, typically very experienced Sage developers have already assessed how easy it would be to keep the old version supported. When it is decided to drop support, it is often not because we don't know how to support both but rather because we do not want to have more complicated code in Sage. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/9b1b17b2-9234-4cfb-82b8-8d9ab61ef457n%40googlegroups.com.
